ANOTHER September, as the title of a Thomas Kinsella poem puts it, and yet again many of us are wrestling with the great philosophical question: "Where (oh where) did that summer go?"
The official onset of autumn allows us to wallow in regret, briefly, about all the things we planned to do during the season just passed, and didn't get around to, again. But behind the remorse there usually lurks a certain relief too: because now at least we can let go of those unrealistic expectations for another year.
We might not welcome summer's demise with quite the rapture of Gerard Manley Hopkins, who on September 1st, 1877, during "half an hour of extreme enthusiasm as I walked home alone. . .from fishing", wrote the poem Hurrahing in Harvest: "Summer ends now; now barbarous in beauty, the stooks arise/ Around; up above, what wind-walks! What lovely behaviour/ Of silk-sack clouds! Has wilder, wilful-wavier/ Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?"
But the sentiment implicit in another annual question popular in Ireland - "How did you get over the Christmas?" - could apply equally to the months of July and August. More often than not (especially if you're the parent of easily bored children, or you work in a newspaper, or both) it is a period to be endured rather than enjoyed.
There's a popular perception in this country that May and September often bring the year's best weather. The argument hasn't stood up too well so far this week. But in any case it probably has more to do with our eternal optimism - miserably misplaced in most years - about the official summer months.
There is no such pressure on September to perform. A few dry days next week and we will hail an Indian summer. But even when it rains, we feel more relaxed with the year's third quarter, which Kinsella's poem imagines as a friendly old cow: "Domestic Autumn, like an animal/ Long used to handling by those countrymen,/ Rubs her kind hide against the bedroom wall. . ." Besides, the onset of autumn brings its own excitements. No sooner have we relinquished the unrealistic hopes of summer than we are surrendering to (perhaps equally unrealistic) optimism about a return to school, or college, or night classes, or the gym. From the smell of pencil cases - fresh wood-shavings, sweet rubber, etc - springs the hope of the great things that will be achieved in another academic year, and this stays with you for life.
And then of course there is the turning of the leaves to look forward to, and the falling of the apples and chestnuts, and all the other wistful beauties of the coming months. In fact, there can be few adjectives in English so expressive as "autumnal", which is where the Americans lose out in calling the season "fall".
Yes, that's an expressive word too, and a lot easier to find rhymes for. But what do you do with it for a descriptive term? Fallal? Fallish? No. "Fall" itself has to double-job as both noun and adjective, an unpleasantly functional arrangement. Whereas half the beauty of "autumnal" is the way the letter "n" - silent and so apparently useless in the noun that US spellers would probably just drop it - suddenly emerges as the hero of the piece.
(Of course, like "gotten", "fall" as a word for autumn is not an American invention at all. It used to be common in English, occurring in Dryden's Juvenal- "What crowds of patients the town doctor kills,/ Or how, last fall, he raised his weekly bills" - among many other works. Then it crossed the Atlantic and, unlike "gotten", it hasn't returned yet.)
Autumn is probably the favourite season of poets, given their greater-than-average disposition towards melancholy. Keats, the master of that emotion, has almost cornered the market with his classic description: "Season of mist and mellow fruitfulness,/ Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;/ Conspiring with him how to load and bless/ With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run." But when wallowing in regret at this time of year, I generally prefer The Falling of the Leaves, which Keats's near namesake Yeats composed to a traditional tune (although, being tone-deaf, he admitted he could not identify "that air or any other" when sung by someone else): "Autumn is over the long leaves that love us,/ And over the mice in the barley sheaves;/ Yellow the leaves of the rowan above us,/ And yellow the wet wild-strawberry leaves.
"The hour of the waning of love has beset us,/ And weary and worn are our sad souls now;/ Let us part, ere the season of passion forget us,/ With a kiss and a tear on thy drooping brow."
ON A related note (but in a different key), I have been asked to draw attention to an event happening in Monaghan town this coming weekend, which in its own way is an attempt to deal with the mixed emotions evoked by the end of summer.
I refer, of course, to the Harvest Blues Festival, in which Monaghan merges for three days with the Mississippi Delta. Performers this year include New Orleans combo Mitch Woods the Big Easy Boogie, incorporating original members of the Fats Domino Band. Soul legend Earl Thomas and New Jersey guitar hero Walter Trout also appear. More information can be found at www.harvestblues.ie.